Unfortunate Proximity

My brain keeps trying to combine these two news stories from the Sun-Sentinel:

Sun-Sentinel: Shoddy work, poorly done.

It's been four months since the Sun-Sentinel re-vamped its website. While an overhaul was desperately needed, the initial response was largely negative. Website navigation was haphazard, and the layout of the sections made little sense: it was like the newspaper had hired a webmaster who had never seen a newspaper. Worse, a lot of the content was old: new content somehow evaporated with the new layout.

So, have they fixed it?

Nope.

It seems like they still haven't grasped very basic concepts necessary to the basic production of a news source. Like the definintion of "news." Or the difference between sports and arts. Or that the Florida Keys are not in Broward County.

Let's take a peak at the Culture section. The good news is that they dropped the stupid title they initially chose for the page: "Going Out." And that's it for the good news.

Here's the top half of the page for November 10:

Initially, it doesn't look too bad. Wait, let me fix something for you:

Yeah, they recycled the Legally Blonde story from March, when it played at the Kravis Center. Isn't news supposed to be, well, NEW?

So Four out of the five stories are current. Oh, didn't you notice? There are FIVE stories, not four. Take a closer look at the right hand column. I know that it looks like it's a title, followed by a lead-in, and then another title followed by another lead-in, but it's not.

It's actually:

It's the kind of sloppy layout that would embarrass a high school newspaper in Podunk, but it's what passes for "style" at the stinking corpse of what was once a mediocre metropolitan newspaper.

So, four out of the five stories are... wait a minute... I almost forgot:

So, it turns out the Sun Sentinel is leading its Culture section with five four three current Sun Sentinel articles.

On the other hand, the Sun-Sentinel IS the only regional news outlet reviewing shows at the Broward Stage Door Theatre. They do deserve credit for that. Kudos to Special Correspondent Bill Hirschman, who makes that effort to cover them.

Do we dare peak below the fold? We do.

Shockingly, most of the articles in the BOOKS section are less than a week old, with only two dating to November 1. Not bad. How many were written by Sun-Sentinel writers? Only one.

Did they do any better in the STAGE section? Of course not!

So, one third of the STAGE section is old, stale stuff. LOCAL stuff, but STALE stuff.

Another sad fact: they dropped some current theatre reviews to hold on to a month old review and a two month old "breaking news" article. And they knocked out more current stories from the top to regurgitate the March article about Legally Blonde.

But that's not the worst of it! The ART section is so unbelievably bad, it's impossible to conclude that the Sun-Sentinel is paying anyone to oversee the page!

Maybe I'm missing something with the Rodeo story; let's take a peak at it:

The event features 96 cowboys from nine states competing in seven events — steer wrestling, team roping, bareback riding, saddle bronc riding, bull riding, tie-down roping and barrel racing — for $100,000 in prize money.

Nope. Sounds like a sport to me. Only a drooling idiot would stick this story in the ART section. An ART section with only one ART story. And worse,that one art story is over a month old. It was news back in September.

No, the Sun-Sentinel still lacks competent editors and a strong guiding hand.

Eric Suesz; with help like this, who needs enemies?

As you know, I've been following the collapse of the Sun-Sentinel, and peering into the feedback from rabidly unhappy readers of the paper.

One complaint got "Buried." And that made me look at it:

This topic was buried on 08/25/09

Buried because: This topic was started by someone using multiple accounts in our system to harass employees, which is against our community guidelines.

And the complaint?

By the way, the original title of this complaint was "second hand news." It was changed by Eric Suesz, and employee of GetSatisfied. About twenty minutes later, he buried the topic.

Here's his immediate response to the user posting the complaint:

This isn't the first time that Suesz has responed to this unhappy Sentinel reader:

Brilliant, Mr. Suesz; the Sun-Sentinel is bleeding readers, and you're telling one reader who cares enough to use your feedback system to kiss off. Hey, why fix the problems so people will stop complaining when you can simply tell them to go away?

At least the Sentinel staffer actually addressed the complaint:

This is where I got involved:

clj replied 5 days ago
If everyone "aggregates," we end up without any news. I don't need to the Sentinel to "aggregate" stories from the Herald or the Post, because I already read those papers. And while it is true that they do include the occasional Sentinel story, the Sun-Sentinel uses more of their content by a very large margin.

You won't survive this way. And frankly, if you can't provide your own content, you don't deserve to.

And Eric did for me what he wouldn't do for Unsatisfied: he responded to the actual complaint:

Eric Suesz replied 5 days ago
clj: This is indeed the challenge that most newspapers face. It's compounded by the fact that newspaper readers more and more prefer to get their news online. And, they don't feel like paying for it anymore. It's a huge struggle. In addition, most readers say they want more local coverage, yet their actual reading habits often run contrary to that.

Some people think the answer may lie in community sourcing the local news. I'm not sure where you live, but where I live there are blogs popping up that are written by my neighbors (even though I don't know them), and they only write about what's going on in my neighborhood, and perhaps the surrounding neighborhoods. Would you agree that this would be a great thing to aggregate? I think it would. That kind of content is perfect for newspaper Web sites to collect and present as "news."

So, perhaps the answer isn't that aggregating stories is bad, but that aggregating relevant stories is the key to success. Just my opinion as a former newspaperman.

So here's my response to Eric Suesz of GetSatisfied, in response to his comment on behalf of the Sun-Sentinel: I'm having to post it here, because apparently once a comment is buried, you can't comment on it any further.

The fact that I'm concerned about the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel should be a small clue as to where I live. A good reporter should be able to take such not-so-subtle clues and make some good deductions.

If I wanted to aggregate my neighbors' blogs, I'd use Google to choose the blogs that I feel do the best job. In fact, I have done exactly that for years. Like most people who follow the news, I also aggregate the Miami Herald and the Palm Beach Post's news (hey, former newsboy, can you figure out where I live yet?) So when the Sun-Sentinel runs those same stories a day later, of course I'm not even mildly happy about it. No one is. And we're NEVER going to be.

Nobody needs the Sentinel to aggregate local news. I need the Sentinel to find the facts behind the news - something that most bloggers can't do. I want professional writers using their training, specialized tools; and exclsuive database access to bring me what my neighbors can't; ACCURACY. I need them to find out what the Herald and Post missed; because they WILL miss something. Good journalism is driven, like everything else, by competition. If the papers aren't competing with each other to get the best version of the story, then we, the readers, are not getting the entire story. We're probably not getting half of it.

I need the Sun-Sentinel to do its job. And it is failing miserably at that. Sure, the others are also falling down on the job, but they are not pushing as much content from the Sentinel as the Sentinel is from both of its "competitors." It's obvious; management isn't even pretending that they're still in the news business.

And neighborhood blogs? Oh, the blogger next door can tell me that a car was broken into around the corner. But they can't tell me if the guy was caught, or if police catch the guy a couple of weeks later. They can only tell me what they see. And that leads to another point: eyewitness testimony is the worst kind; eyes are notoriously easy to fool.

Journalists, in theory, are trained to be objective. That blogger who rails against the city may be able to inform me that sewers are being dug up, but he's likely to skew the story to suit his opinions. We should not rely on bloggers for news. And for someone working for a newspaper - even in an advisory capacity - to state otherwise, only illustrates how poorly advised newspapers have become. If YOU are who the Sentinel is listening to, no wonder it's in the toilet.

As for blaming the readers: "they don't feel like paying for it anymore" - well, that's another incidence of ignorance paraded as wisdom.

The fact is that readers have never paid for news. Oh, sure, they bought papers. But that wasn't what paid for the news. Advertising paid for that, not the cover price. Ads have paid for the real costs of the paper since Ben Franklin posed as a Puritan widow to write advice to the lovelorn. And if you don't know that, then you never learned much about the business.

And do you know what else advertising pays for? Internet websites.

The problem isn't that people don't want to pay to read the online stories, the problem is that a lot of idiots think that's the problem, so they ignore the actual problem, which is the quality of the content, and the ease of access to it.

Early on, the troglodytes running newspapers thought that only their subscribers should be able to read news online. Or that at the very least, they ought to block non-subscriber's access for a couple of days. Their mistake? The belief that they are the only available place to get news. The mistake still being made by you and the Sun-Sentinel.

Those first few years shaped internet users' preferences: they learned that there were websites that didn't block or limit access, so users went there INSTEAD of waiting for their local news provider to "let" them see current stories. For YEARS, the Sun-Sentinel - and most newspapers - actively drove prospective readers away.

"Aggregating" that content won't save any newspaper anywhere, ever. Only an idiot could think this was a viable plan. And here's why: WE ARE ALREADY GOING TO THE PLACES YOU ARE AGGREGATING. We were there yesterday. Why would the fact that you have it a day later attract us? Can you imagine a restaurant raiding the trash bin of a successful restaurant so it could sell the scraps? "Well, you ate there last night, so we went and got it for you!"

If the Sun-Sentinel is to survive, it must bring me something no other news source is bringing me. And it CANNOT accomplish that by bringing me stuff from the other news sources.

That's just my opinion as one of the millions of people you need to read your newspaper.

Hey, Eric: you miscalculated again. You didn't end comments by "burying" the discussion, you simply forced me to take it somewhere else. It's just the like what the Sun-Sentinel - and you - are doing to its readers; driving us to go someplace where we can get what we need.

Isn't about time you guys started learning from your mistakes, instead of protecting them from criticism?

And you'd better start learning quick. We won't bother with you much longer.

Sun Sentinel: A Waste of Paper

And I mean that literally. Newspapers, including the Sentinel, keep reducing the size of the paper to cut down the costs. The length of articles are trimmed, the comics are shrunk to molecular levels, and content is generally reduced.

Because they "don't have room" for the same amount of news they used to carry, they fire their reporters - a move akin to an airplane pilot removing pieces of the engine to conserve fuel.

So it's insulting to readers and the unemployed alike to see things like the Outlook section of today's Sun-sentinel:

While it's refreshingly uncluttered with advertising, it's glaringly uncluttered by content, too. Less than a quarter of the page serves any purpose. I can't believe that I'd rather see advertising than this, but it's true. At least advertising pays the bills. Most of this page is simply wasted. The valuable space is squandered for no reason whatsoever.

But that's just the cover; it's just as bad inside:

Half the page to the left is taken up by advertising. But for once, I won't complain, because at least it's serving an honest purpose: generating revenue. Of the remainder, about 25% is wasted with a pointless repetition of the logo from the front page. And to the right, no advertising, and again, at least 25% of the page is completely wasted space. It's not informing you, it's not enhancing the story, it's just another repetition of space that should have been used to serve the paper's mission: delivering news or generating ad revenue to underwrite the costs of delivering news.

The little space that is being used for content is a discussion of the benefits and drawbacks of social media. That's three pages to give us two accounts of the same damned story. And it's one that isn't particularly important; it's been covered better, and in more detail, elsewhere. This is old news. This is a colossal waste of space.

It's stunning to think that their print edition is actually worse than their website. Which only reminds me that the opinion section of the paper and the opinion section of the website have completely different names! Is there anyone who isn't an idiot at the Sentinel?

Another page turn brings us to Sun-Sentinel's Earl Maulker, telling us that in order to remain relevant, he, and most of the Sentinel staff, are now on Twitter.

Earl, I gotta tell you, 140 characters is fine for a Tweet. But a newspaper article requires a hell of a lot more. I expect pages to be full of stories, not meaningless decorative graphics, especially for what we're paying these days. This week's Outlook section is an outrage. The image is not a graph, nor is it some informative picture of people communicating. It's a slap in the face to everyone you fired, and it's a spit in the eye of your readers.

Maulker, the Tribune should can your ass and use your salary and benefits to bring back some of the real journalists who lost their jobs so some snot-nosed interns could gut what's left of the corpse of a once-proud news source.

Tweet THAT.

The Sun-Sentinel: New Levels of Suckitude.

I try. I want to enjoy my local paper's website, I really do.

But the Sun-Sentinel website is such a lousy steaming pile of shit that it's impossible to ignore how bad the site is.

Take this, from the today's homepage:

Oooh. Inviting. I take a drink now and then. I'm up for trying out a new place. Let's see what they got:

Hmm. Nothing about a "good pour" here; Lil Kim, some asshole named "Pharrel" (he's an asshole because he doesn't spell it with an "F"), Broke I mean Brooke Hogan, blah blah blah, nothing about a good pour here.

Oh, wait, the "improved" Sun-Sentinel tends to put critical stuff "below the fold." After all, why put the story you want up top where you expect, when they can make you scroll and scroll and scroll....

Nope. Nothing relating to the link I clicked on AT ALL. Just when you think the Sun-Sentinel could not suck any more than it already does, it goes and sucks more.

Media in the 21st Century: Beat Sharing, Illustrated

Once upon a time, in a more enlightened era, great journals competed to bring readers exclusive stories of the day. They were locked in a struggle, perpetually trying to "scoop" each other, to find news before their nemeses even knew anything was happening.

Not anymore! Now, the papers have fired virtually all their reporters, holding on to a few recent grads interns who never heard of The Front Page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Front_Page or saw His Girl Friday,( but did see the incredibly bad re-make with Burt Reynolds and Kathleen Turner that co-starred Superman(, and practice "beat sharing," where instead of each paper covering all the "beats," they each cover their own neighborhoods and pass the stories back and forth, kind of like you did with homework in 5th grade.

Here, we see the Miami Herald sharing the day's news with the Sun-Sentinel....
It's on their website and in your Sunday paper as we speak. As you can imagine, they save a lot of money doing this!

Sun-Sentinel: VIEWS layout lacks Vision.

Geez, the individual pages look so pretty that I really want to like the new website. But I can't. It's a skin-deep makeover, and as soon as you click some links you discover that the pretty new website is a decaying corpse. I am appalled at the poor quality of this makeover. Just when I think it couldn't possible get worse, it does.

I like opinion and analysis, so in an attempt to give the drooling idiots at Sun-Sentinel a chance, I click on the VIEWS tab, which in most places allows you to set text, color palettes, and so on, but some clueless nitwit thought it would be a cool name for the Opinion section, because Opinion is so, you know, accurate.

And accuracy seems to be just a word at this exciting new Sun-Sentinel.

Let's take a look at the top of the page:


"Ideas and Opinions from South Florida." OK, I'm down with that. They should dump the "Views" moniker and call it this. So, what are the South Florida Ideas and Opinions at the top of the lise?

Civics, with a picture of Bob Graham. OK, that works.

The Everglades, a photo gallery guide... which has no place on an Ideas & Opinion page, but makes sense if "Views" is supposed to be a collection of images, which frankly makes more sense than the way they're using it now. But the gallery offers neither ideas nor opinions, and belongs somewhere else.

Al Franken? WTF? Al Franken is not from South Florida. But it's not ABOUT Al Franken, it's BY Al Franken! The article has nothing to do with South Florida. And that picture isn't Al Franken. I have no idea who that person is, and clicking through only deepens the mystery. This is a MASSIVE fail, and we're only at the tippy-top of the page! This doesn't bode well: 2/3 of the content so far is crap.

It's followed by a list of titles. No explanation is given about the nature of these articles, or their origin. But clicking through, you discover that each of the eight titles is an editorial. Several of them are over a week old.

Scrolling down, we get Chan Lowe's blog, presumably so they can double the fist article with a cartoon to emulate the print version. Eh. He offers opinions, I guess it works.

Next, we find "Letters." Are these letters to the editor? From the editor? It doesn't say. Like so much else in the brave new, new and improved, updated Sun Sentinel, the reader has to guess. I'd like to peruse all the letters to the editor. On other sites, not only are letters to the editor properly labeled letters to the editor, at the bottom of the little section there's a link to "more letters."

But that's just, you know, something good papers do. Good papers also let you look at yesterday's letters, and even letters from the past 7 days. Not the Sun-Sentinel! You'll see today's pathetic offering, and THAT'S IT! Want stale opinions? Scroll back up to the unlabeled editorials!

Continuing, we find another blog, TALK BACK SOUTH FLORIDA. It lists the titles of a few blog posts. Want to click through to the entire blog? Tough, because the Sentinel isn't interested in allowing you to do THAT.

Next we come upon COMMENTARY. A small selection of titles, but no explanations. Is this more letters? Something else? We don't know. Guess. WRONG! Guess again. WRONG AGAIN! HA HA! WE FOOLED YOUR SORRY ASS!

It's columnists. Each title is by a different syndicated columnist. You can only discover this by clicking on the link, going to the article, and scrolling all the way down to the bottom of the column. In a good paper, you have a page dedicated to just the columnists, and it's laid out so you can see which columns are by which columnists. But in the crass world of the Sun-Sentinel, one columnist is much like another. The Wii-playing interns that make up the web design team don't know the difference, why should you?

And after the cleverly hidden Columnists, we have .... MORE EDITORIALS! They're even clearly labeled as such. Actually, they're called MORE RECENT EDITORIALS. But they are stinky-old. You can't see yesterday's letter to the editor, but you can read last month's stale opinion that has been washed away by the tide of developing events.

I never thought I'd find myself pining for the old Sun-Sentinel website.

Sun-Sentinel: Topix Removal Turns Toxic

The Sun-Sentinel seems to have severely underestimated their readers. Browsing their Feedback page, you find the same complaints again and again, despite the moderator's best attempts at hiding the facts.

• They hate the basic format
• They hate the way the website is "organized."
• But most of all, they hate the fact that Topix was removed.
  

Topix provided the anemic Sun-Sentinel with a much-needed illusion of vitality. Readers could comment on whatever paltry stories they found of interest in the rapidly dissipating paper, and interact effectively with each other, debating issues they found important.

It went far beyond simply allowing a user to append a few words about a story: they could respond directly to each other, they could quote portions of each other's comments to help make the discussion more coherent, and they were given ample space to write their thoughts. It gave readers the impression that the Sun-Sentinel was fostering discussion of important events of the day.

It's an impression that increasingly appears to have been false.

Angry readers keep demanding to know what happened to their Topix accounts, and all the discussions that they were participating in when Sun-Sentinel pooped out the "improved" website.

When Topix tried to inform Sun-Sentinel users that their Topix accounts were still active, staffers were quick to claim it was "spam" and removed.


The Sentinel staff claims they have discontinued Topix to replace it with something better. But the fact is, they didn't replace it with something better. They didn't replace it with something that's as good. In fact, they barely left the ability to leave comments at all. Many articles don't permit comments at all, and the few articles that do have a tool so inadequate that it can't even keep up with typing, and cuts the user off after a few sentences, it's obvious that there has been only regression. Matt Sokoloff and his team keep talking about it, but the feature doesn't appear to exist beyond staff's claims that does.

The Sun-Sentinel has refused to respond to the entirely reasonable question "why did they removed a popular feature without having a suitable replacement available to it?" It seems blisteringly obvious that if the new system isn't available, the old one should be left in place until it is. But grasping the obvious doesn't appear to be a condition of employment at the Sun-Sentinel's IT department.

It seems that while the website team for the Sun-Sentinel have bamboozled management, soon-to-be-former Sentinel readers are not so gullible.

They know when they're being fed a line of BS.

Sun-Sentinel: Well, DUH.

This story was in the July 3 online edition:



Really?  Why, the next thing you know, they'll tell us that someone who was beaten to death died of blunt force trauma!

Sun-Sentinel; All The News We Can Hide Away

Before I dig into the problems with the Sun-Sentinels' new website, I want to comment on what they did right: the basic layout of the individual pages. Overall, those pages are much improved over the old site. Could they stand some improvement? You bet! But it's still better than what it replaced, even with the way the pages lurche when you're scrolling through them.

It's in site navigation that the Sun-Sentinel falls flat on its face. And let's face it: if you can't find what you're looking for, you go somewhere else.

The thing is, it should be a no-brainer. Newspapers have been organizing stories into sections for a couple of hundred years.

The traditional sections:
Major News
- stories with the widest impact or importance, National and International stories.
Local News
- stories that hit close to home
Entertainment
- everything to make you happy
Opinion
- what people think about the news
Sports
- nuff said
Business
- investments, stocks, discussions of the business world
Real Estate
- what to look for, hot deals, good neighborhoods, listings.
Home & Garden
- taking care of your family: food, fashion, health advice, and so on.

Seems pretty familiar, yes? Let's look across the Navigation bar for the "new and improved" Sun-Sentinel:


In case you have a hard time seeing the picture (stop using Internet Explorer!), the options are:

HOME
NEWS
BROWARD
PALM BEACH
DOLPHINS
SPORTS
LIFE&FAMILY
MONEY
GOING OUT
HEALTH
VIEWS

Now, which of these leads to the TV listings? It's not under "News". It's not on the "Home" page. It's not in "Views." "Going Out" seems to have replaced "Entertainment," but of course, you don't "go out" to watch TV, which you usually do in your living room. And naturally, the TV listings are not there.

It seems to me that there must have been some discussion of where to put the TV listings, since there's no really obvious place to put them anymore. And it seems to me, that when they realized it didn't fit into an entertainment section labeled "Going Out," there should have been some discussion of the dubious wisdom of sticking with that label.

Instead, they stuck TV listings and articles in "Life&Family."

Let's look for a new house! A new house for our Family to spend its Life watching TV.

Let's look over that menu bar:
HOME
NEWS
BROWARD
PALM BEACH
DOLPHINS
SPORTS
LIFE&FAMILY
MONEY
GOING OUT
HEALTH
VIEWS

Hmm, no Real Estate section. It's not under "Life&Family." It's not under "Broward" or "Palm Beach." Wait, "News" has "Condos and "HOAS." No, "HOAS," not "WHORES." Don't sweat it, natural mistake. Hmm. This leads to a list of stories by Daniel Vasquez. Wait, what's that at the top of the list?



OK, so we click on "Realestate" which takes us...to a big page labeled "Real Estate." It's a subset of Business. Hmm, there's no "Business" section, but there's "Money" so....we click on that.

MONEY:
Your Career
It's Your Money Blog
House Keys Blog
Personal Finance
Bargains
Business
Consumer Blog
Real Estate
Condo & HOAS.

I suppose that Real Estate does have some financial ties. But if you're looking for a place to live, you might not be thinking along those lines. If I want to rent a place, can I find that here? No? So where are the Classifieds? OH, they're a submenu of HOME.

On the Feedback page, a lot of people complained about not being able to find Palm Beach or Broward News stories. That's because they were looking in NEWS, instead of the big BROWARD or PALM BEACH menus on the navigation bar.

So mouse-over those bars: You end up with a list that exactly coincides with those weekly Community sections the SS tucks into appropriate editions. It's easy to conclude that that is the purpose of those buttons.

They have put them back under NEWS, too.

So what else is under NEWS?
Weather
Hurricane HQ
Obits
Traffic
Schools
Florida
Nation/World
Condos & Whores, em, HOAS
Blogs
News Tips
Broward County
Palm Beach County

Why is "Condos & HOAS" here? "Blogs?" Let us see what they say about "Blogs;"

About our blogs
On our blogs (short for "web logs"), Sun-Sentinel journalists escape the confines of the printed page and newspaper production schedules, and publish immediately on the World Wide Web.
We keep you current every day with the latest news and sports, the liveliest features and opinion.

Interesting. Why don't they just publish the news stories into news? I mean, they are a news paper, aren't they? Isn't this the entire reason they exist? They have to shunt the best and latest news into a blog? Really? No wonder they're going tits-up losing readers. I'm not opposed to blogs, but they work better as opinion or "color," not the guts of the paper.

Not sure why they need the Dolphins on the menu bar, when they are already listed under Sports.

But then, the goobers at the Sentinel also tucked "travel" under "Life & Family" instead of "Going Out." After all, I'm pretty sure you have to leave the house to travel...Just like you have to spend Money to shop, and yet the Shopping Blog is also under "Life & Family."

Also under "Going Out," we find the Gambling Blog, which should absolutely be under Money. Music is also under "Going Out." Well, if it's concerts, I guess that makes sense, but you don't necessarily "go out" to listen to tunes on your CD/MP3 player... and hey, where have they hidden the book reviews?

Under "Art/Stage." You are supposed to magically know that the Sun-Sentinel staff believes that this is a clear label for "culture," which of course includes books.

There's no explanation of why HEALTH isn't a subset of Life & Family; it has no sub-menus, which to me is a clear indicator it should not be its own section. But wait, CNN has a Health Section, or actually a "Dr. Gupta Says..." section. So I guess that's why: because CNN says.

So we're down to VIEWS. Which, logic dictates, is where all the photo galleries are...what the-! There are no VIEWS at all! It's all opinions!

So this is where they hid the Opinion section. Why call it "Views," which has other meanings, when you could call it "Opinion," which is pretty specific to what's being publishing there?

Keep it clear, keep it concise. Give us sections with logical names, with a logical set of sub-categories under them. Don't make us dig around to find the stories we want: because frankly, it's a lot easier to go the the Herald and Post than to dig around the jittery mess you've made of your website.

And honestly, I'd rather have the old website and most of the reporters you fired. I'm tired of discovering stories I read elsewhere, and earlier. It's not news if I've read it somewhere else, first.

Sun-Sentinel: How to Skew Feedback to Impress the Boss

As you might have heard by now, the Sun-Sentinel has re-vamped its look. Each page is moderately easier to read (if you have really good eyesight) but site navigation is in the dumps. (More on that later).

Worse, they've chosen to use GetSatisfaction to track customer feedback, probably the most annoying webtool since the pop-up add. Forget about the stick-in-the-eye tab that sticks out of the right side of the screen, scrolling with the window so you can't ignore it, threatening to leap out at the slightest mouse-over. No, the worst part of GetSatisfaction is that it's designed to spin customer complaints so they look like positive feed back. It's really intensely evil.

So how do the do it? Let's look at the top of the feedback form:

Note that you have exactly four options, and complaining isn't one of them. You can ask a question, share an idea, report a problem or give praise. So what's wrong with that? Well, say you're a board member, and you want to know how your readers are filling out the feedback forms: primarily, you want to know how many complaints there are. And guess what? There aren't any. I know, you think I'm nitpicking. I'm not.

You can't register a complaint. So what can you do?


Questions are good: that denotes interest in the production. It indicates people want to know more. People care enough to aske


Shared ideas mean that people are taking ownership of the website: they really want to get involved. They care enough to share.


Problems can be addressed: problems are usually things like "the link is broken" and "the page is missing" which you expect when you change format. But problems means the team can fix things. "Well done, team!"


Give praise says it all. You love the product.

As you can see, right off the bat, the entire thing is skewed to indicate positive feedback.

But it gets worse.

GetSatisfaction offers another feature: it gauges the emotional state of the respondent. After you fill out the field with your question/idea/problem/praise, you scroll down to this:

This is where the designers of GetSatisfaction get insidious, and really screw over the reader and make the web designer look brilliant. A lot of people skip over tags; no big deal, you said what you wanted. And if they look to the right, they see emoticons.

How does "this" make you feel? What is "this?" It doesn't say. "Well, I'm happy that you're letting me give you feedback. I feel good about that."

And the damage is done. 168 support topics, most of which are complaints, and according this evil little tool, everyone's happy about the new Sun-Sentinel website.

They're happy about the fonts they can't see, they're happy about the pages they can't find, they're happy about things they find horrible:

So upper management asks the web design team how things are going, the design team shows management these GetSatisfaction results that are little more than fantasies, and six months later, the Sun-Sentinel lays off the 6 actual reporters they still have working for them, while blaming people for just not being interested in news anymore.

And we, the readers, get screwed again.

Sun-Sentinel Misleads Its Readers; A Shameful Poll

The Sun-Sentinel completely abandons any pretense of having even a modicum of journalistic integrity by setting up the most ludicrous poll of 2008 to accompany a story on former US Rep (and current sleazebag) Mark Foley.

The article itself is a pretty cut and dried story; The FDLE announces that it doesn't have enough evidence to warrant filing charges against Foley.

"FDLE conducted as thorough and comprehensive investigation as possible considering Congress and Mr. Foley denied us access to critical data," Florida Department of Law Enforcement Commissioner Gerald Bailey said.

The crux of the matter is that while Foley may be guilty as sin, they can't prove it.

Last year, the general counsel of the U.S. House of Representatives refused to release Foley's government-issued computers without Foley's permission.

Not surprisingly, Foley, through his lawyer, refused to let them dig into computers paid for with your tax dollars. Would any company in the private sector have gotten away with such an action? Of course not! But when you start dealing with the federal government, especially Congress, justice takes a back seat to saving your ass.

By the way, the article does not address the fact that Foley would not have been protected had he worked in the private sector; that's another lapse, although not as large as the Poll.

This story DOES raise a question that DOES warrant asking for opinions. Just not the one that the idiots who pass themselves off as editors chose to mount:

Just so we're clear, the only way this poll makes sense is if you assume that FDLE had enough evidence to prosecute Foley but let him off the hook. That assumption is a direct contradiction of the story that it accompanies.

Instead of asking readers how they felt about Congress' choice to obstruct justice and let a pedophile run free, the Sun-Sentinel chose to insinuate that the FDLE had a choice on whether or not to pursue a case in which they have no evidence to present at trial, even though the Sun-Sentinel just published a story that flat-out states Congress acted to hinder the investigation.

Did the editor who signed off on this idiot poll even read the story it accompanies?

This is an egregious breach of ethics on the part of the Sun-Sentinel. Instead of enlightening the public, the Sun-Sentinel has chosen to create a false issue, essentially lying to the public.

Let's be clear; if FDLE takes this case to court, and it gets to trial, the case will be lost because they don't have the original source of the emails in the chain of custody. Without that key evidence, Foley would be acquitted. And because of double-jeopardy, we'd never be able to re-visit this case. He'd be scott-free. By declining to file charges now, there will be no trial. If a Congress in the not-too-distant-future is overcome with decency and morality and a love of justice, they could choose to make the computer and its evidence available to the FDLE, and Foley could still be brought to justice. If Congress can be made to do the right thing.

But FDLE can't force Congress to do a damned thing. Only public outrage has a hope of doing that, but the Sun-Sentinel has acted instead to direct outrage at the FDLE.

This is worse than a simple omission of fact; the Sun-Sentinel is misleading its readers. They ought to be ashamed.

Sun-Sentinel: weak on local geography

When I clicked on the "Regional/Florida" link in today's Sun-Sentinel website, I noticed this entry for Miami-Dade County:

But no matter how you look at the map, Key West still isn't anywhere near Miami-Dade County.

As you can see from this readily available map, Key West is Monroe County, and is over a hundred miles from the Miami-Dade County Line.

If they can't get such a simple fact straight, why would anyone believe them about more complicated stories?